I come at this review of Paranormal Activity 2 (PA 2) with feelings just about as mixed as the reviews that came out upon its release.

It is unsurprising to me that the ratio of positive to negative reviews on Rotten Tomatoes is roughly 50-50, though the positive nods outweigh the negative by a slight margin.

I am a fan of the first movie, but was a bit dissuaded from watching the second by most reviews that claimed that it was more of the same old thing. But having revisited the first one - and having heard good things about the third - I decided to go ahead and place it on my Netflix queue.

So last night I settled down to watch it.

Before I go into my thoughts about Paranormal Activity 2, I should state right away that the movie did exactly what it set out to do. While it was still the same set up and, on a very basic level, a re-tread of the format of the first movie, augmented by a few more cameras due to a much better budget, PA 2 managed to conjure the same creeping sense of dread and maintained the same sustained suspense that the first one achieved.

It also is another pristine demonstration of what simple scares and basic effects of lighting and sound can achieve. If anything, this series has demonstrated what Robert Wise already knew when he made The Haunting - the best scares and the best tensions are more effective when left to the imagination.

PA 2 accomplished its principle task. While your mileage may vary, the sequel successfully unnerved me in a way I have not been scared by a movie in awhile. After watching it, and exulting in how well it succeeded in creeping me out, I woke at 2 am with nightmares, a case of nerves, and angrily chastizing myself for jumping at every mundane popping sound in my house. There is a part of me that wound up finding it basically silly to criticize a sequel that treads over the same territory if the filmmakers do such a good job at it.
So basically, I recommend PA 2 as one of those rare sequels that manages to equal, and in some cases surpass, the original.

And yet is at this point that I have to register a basic disappointment. Admittedly, my criticism is of the "that's not the way I would have done it" variety and is therefore subject to being dismissed as such with however much prejudice you choose to use.

While PA2 succeeds on the level at which it wants to operate, I still find fault with the direction the filmmakers have taken the basic story.

The flaw is not as glaring, or irritating, as the series of episodic contradictions that invade every sequel in the Saw series when it bent itself into a corkscrew trying to reconcile plot developments from the previous sequel into the next movie. However, the first movie related a story in which Katie's personal history is intrinsically connected to this invisible presence plaguing her. While it is too much of an oversimplification of the plot, the unexplained presence specifically selects Katie as its victim and, at its conclusion, successfully realizes its goal - the outright possession of her physical body. That seems foremost in the mind of the entity - to remove Micah's thoroughly irritating presence from existence, which honestly the audience should applaud, and inhabit Katie.

Yet when PA 2 begins, the filmmakers have to contrive a new motivation for the demon that, one, jibes with the information received from the first movie and also manages to fit with this new story. Quite frankly, from that perspective, the overall storyline that now involves a family history of soul-selling becomes more than a bit silly. Worse, it reduces the unexplained malevolence of the presence to no more than an invisible Rumplestiltskin.

The fortunate thing is that the scare parts still worked marvelously despite an overall disappointing story.

While it is not an apt comparison overall, mainly because PA 2 doesn't suck, I am tempted to compare what PA 2 has done to its "monster" what the illconsidered Rasen did to Ringu's Sadako. The changes that filmmakers forced on the creature in its sequel - because every supernatural presence just needs 'splaining - while convenient from the standpoint of planning for future sequels, has actually served to diminish the potency of monster's menace.

And that's too bad, because I am intrigued with this monster and I am a bit sorry that, instead of making the monster even MORE horrifying, which the maker's of Ringu wisely did with Sadako in Ringu 2, they, instead, decided that the most interesting part of the Paranormal Activity series is this dumb family and their irritating husbands.

I hope PA 3 rectifies that situation, but since it continues to be a prequel, this time featuring Katie as a young lass, well......

I enjoyed this one and with the families multiple camera security system we got more of a visual flair than what the first ones sole camera on a tripod allowed.

On the downside it makes the daughter and the family complete morons for not reviewing the footage. If you swear, "Daddy it totally happened!" and are not believed because you are too lazy to pop up the security footage to back up you claim, well you're a moron.

I liked the multiple camera angles, too, specifcally because it allowed the filmmakers to have their cake and eat it. They could keep the found footage motif when it suited them and still tell a more conventionally cinematic story. The only time I found the logic of handheld camerawork difficult to swallow was in the climactic basement scene, but by that time, I was too invested in "what happens next" to really care.

And yeah - the fact that there were not that many reviews of camera footage - especially after the avalanche of unexplained phenomena - challenged credibility too. It fits with the theme of denial in the face of mounting evidence the writer's were working with, but after so long and so much crap happening around you, you are no longer sticking your head in the sand. Rather you are a masochist happily begging for the probing to begin.